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Launch HN: Freestyle: Sandboxes for AI Coding Agents

https://www.freestyle.sh
51•benswerd•1h ago•20 comments

Germany Doxes "UNKN," Head of RU Ransomware Gangs REvil, GandCrab

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/04/germany-doxes-unkn-head-of-ru-ransomware-gangs-revil-gandcrab/
166•Bender•4h ago•70 comments

sc-im Spreadsheets in Your Terminal

https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im
56•m-hodges•1h ago•9 comments

I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

https://www.0xsid.com/blog/wont-download-your-app
611•ssiddharth•3h ago•328 comments

A Cryptography Engineer's Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines

https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/
74•thadt•2h ago•18 comments

Book Review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/no_antimimetics/
104•ibobev•4h ago•73 comments

Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb updates

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
303•StanAngeloff•4h ago•196 comments

81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

https://twitter.com/Suzierizzo1/status/2040864617467924865
179•josephcsible•1h ago•150 comments

Reducto releases Deep Extract

https://reducto.ai/blog/reducto-deep-extract-agent
18•raunakchowdhuri•1h ago•1 comments

Sky – an Elm-inspired language that compiles to Go

https://github.com/anzellai/sky
25•whalesalad•2h ago•2 comments

What Being Ripped Off Taught Me

https://belief.horse/notes/what-being-ripped-off-taught-me/
211•doctorhandshake•5h ago•128 comments

Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed

https://www.osnews.com/story/144737/adobe-secretly-modifies-your-hosts-file-for-the-stupidest-rea...
24•rglullis•18m ago•1 comments

Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work

https://github.com/arman-bd/guppylm
775•armanified•17h ago•119 comments

The Last Quiet Thing

https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing
31•coinfused•2d ago•12 comments

Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-a-coherent-gui-strategy-since-petzold/
716•naves•1d ago•496 comments

PostHog (YC W20) Is Hiring

1•james_impliu•4h ago

Show HN: GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once

https://www.govauctions.app/
10•player_piano•1h ago•6 comments

An open-source 240-antenna array to bounce signals off the Moon

https://moonrf.com/
224•hillcrestenigma•14h ago•45 comments

Gemma 4 on iPhone

https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/google-ai-edge-gallery/id6749645337
796•janandonly•23h ago•222 comments

France pulls last gold held in US for $15B gain

https://www.mining.com/france-pulls-last-gold-held-in-us-for-15b-gain/
485•teleforce•9h ago•261 comments

The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes

https://twitter.com/exQUIZitely/status/2040777977521398151
242•keepamovin•14h ago•156 comments

Show HN: Real-time AI (audio/video in, voice out) on an M3 Pro with Gemma E2B

https://github.com/fikrikarim/parlor
224•karimf•1d ago•26 comments

One ant for $220: The new frontier of wildlife trafficking

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4g44zv37qo
94•gmays•4d ago•26 comments

LÖVE: 2D Game Framework for Lua

https://github.com/love2d/love
381•cl3misch•2d ago•197 comments

Signals, the push-pull based algorithm

https://willybrauner.com/journal/signal-the-push-pull-based-algorithm
131•mpweiher•2d ago•34 comments

Drop, formerly Massdrop, ends most collaborations and rebrands under Corsair

https://drop.com/
110•stevebmark•13h ago•54 comments

Running Gemma 4 locally with LM Studio's new headless CLI and Claude Code

https://ai.georgeliu.com/p/running-google-gemma-4-locally-with
369•vbtechguy•1d ago•92 comments

Sheets Spreadsheets in Your Terminal

https://github.com/maaslalani/sheets
166•_____k•2d ago•44 comments

Music for Programming

https://musicforprogramming.net
304•merusame•23h ago•156 comments

Show HN: Gemma Gem – AI model embedded in a browser – no API keys, no cloud

https://github.com/kessler/gemma-gem
135•ikessler•17h ago•18 comments
Open in hackernews

The Beam

https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/the-beam-erlangs-virtual-machine/
105•Alupis•11mo ago

Comments

schultzer•10mo ago
One thing that is great about Erlang’s pattern matching is that it makes it extremely approachable for writing, lexer, parser and compilers in it: https://github.com/elixir-dbvisor/sql and with Elixir macros and sigils then you can embed other languages like sql and zig to name a few!
wk_end•10mo ago
Does Erlang/Elixer have any edge over Ocaml or Haskell in that niche? They also have pattern matching, of course, and strong static types tend to work nicely for compilers too.

Of course, the big superpower they have is the BEAM and the robust multiprocessing support there, but that’s not especially helpful for compilers…or is it?

schultzer•10mo ago
Elixir compiler is written in Erlang, Erlang can produce very efficient code, the new json library can beat c libraries at decoding / encoding. And you get this with a strongly typed dynamic language, which is a distributed language. It’s really hard to beat the BEAM, if only we had better number crunching, but in so cases you can always write a nif.
dcsommer•10mo ago
"Strongly typed" is stretching it. Type checking is bolted on and not part of `erlc`. Typing is quite unergonomic in Erlang/Elixir (similar to Typescript bolted onto JS).

The type system is one of the weakest parts of the beam ecosystem.

troupo•10mo ago
Elixir team is slowly bringing in type checking into the language: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2022/10/05/my-future-with-elixi... and https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/gradual-set-theoretic-types.html
Munksgaard•10mo ago
Erlang/Elixir are certainly strongly typed[0] but they are not statically typed[1].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_system#Static_type_checki...

lolinder•10mo ago
You can't really use the word "certainly" when speaking about "strongly typed" because the entire concept is fuzzy and subjective. From the article you linked:

> > However, there is no precise technical definition of what the terms mean and different authors disagree about the implied meaning of the terms and the relative rankings of the "strength" of the type systems of mainstream programming languages. For this reason, writers who wish to write unambiguously about type systems often eschew the terms "strong typing" and "weak typing" in favor of specific expressions such as "type safety".

I personally think the whole concept of "strongly typed", which is usually used as a prop to make dynamic languages count as part of the cool kids typed-languages club, should be ditched as a point of argument. The supposed "weakly typed" languages people are usually comparing to (like C) aren't actually framed as viable alternative for problems dynamic languages are suited for, so they're something of a straw man. I'd like to see advocates for dynamically typed languages ditch the obsession with having types like the cool kids and instead focus on showing why dynamism is valuable.

There are plenty of great cases to make for dynamism without having to argue on rhetorical ground that the static languages defined and dominate.

Munksgaard•10mo ago
I agree that the terminology is not ideal, but think there's a huge difference between JS' "weak types", i.e. abundant implicit conversions, and e.g. Elixirs "strong types", where `1 + "foo"` is a runtime error. I don't care if we call the latter something else though. Any good suggestions?

That said, I prefer having both strong and static typing, but that's another argument.

zbentley•10mo ago
I'd suggest "high-cast" and "low-cast". They draw attention to the thing that people usually mean when they talk about strong (not static) typing: whether operations in a language bias towards automatically coercing types so that a non-type-error result can be produced or not. High-cast languages tend towards requiring explicit type conversion; low-cast languages tend towards both implicit conversion and more complex behaviors when more than one type is supplied to a given operation. Also, the terms pun nicely with "high-cost" and "low-cost".

That said, it's still a spectrum and there's a lot of subjectiveness here. Everyone agrees that '1 + "foo"' is meaningless, but what about string multiplication? If a language documents that an integer multiplied by a string repeats the string, is that weakly typed/low-cast, or is it just documented multiplication operator behavior? If string multiplication is a whole separate operator, is that more strongly typed (and if so, are we all gonna be able to sleep at night since that means Perl 5 is more strongly typed than Python)?

That subjectiveness extends into the domain of hidden runtime costs, as well. Theoretically, any iterable of hashable items can be passed to a language's implementation of "HashSet::union(items)". But the implementation/performance of "union()" might differ based on the type of the iterable: should we be allowed to pass a lazy iterator which produces values after arbitrary custom computations? Many languages say "yes" here, but some consider collecting/each-ing the iterator something that must be explicit so the cost/exhaustion/side-effectfulness of the iteration is made clear. How about unioning a set with a vector, versus another set? Very different algorithmic behavior happens inside the union if another hash set is supplied instead of, say, a static array or linked list; while the complexity for nonlazy unions is always O(N), the average complexity/wallclock performance may be very different. Rust's stdlib, for example, discourages this kind of heterogenous union (not, I suspect, out of a desire for high-cast-explicitness, but because it wants to encourage use of its lazy O(1) union system instead). Are the answers to that question part of the high-cast/low-cast (or strong/weak type system) spectrum, or are they just specific choices made by each language's collections library? Ask 10 programmers, and I suspect you'll get a lot of different answers.

cess11•10mo ago
Dialyzer might be considered "bolted on", but the BEAM itself is strongly and dynamically typed. In Elixir the compiler is getting static typing as well.

https://learnyousomeerlang.com/types-or-lack-thereof

These languages have other properties that can play the role that types are sometimes relied upon to do. It's uncommon that I think in types at all when building things in Elixir, thinking about shapes usually gets me all the way.

In my experience string processing libraries are the weakest part, due to some of them having abysmal performance for whatever reason. Last I had this problem I wanted to do ETL on mbox files but gave up and did it with someone's PHP one-class weekend project instead.

cess11•10mo ago
You probably don't, Numerical Elixir/Nx has been out for years and did the NIF:ing for you.

It's one part of why it's quite convenient to juggle ML and LLM tasks on the BEAM, and easy enough that I can manage it.

https://github.com/elixir-nx

Munksgaard•10mo ago
As someone who has used both SML, Haskell, Rust and Elixir professionally: No, not really.

Access to the BEAM is nice, but unless you're targeting the BEAM in your compiler I don't see any benefit. Even if you're targeting the BEAM, you might decide to use another language, cf. Gleam: https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/

Edit: Actually, one thing I will mention is the superior support in Elixir/Erlang for pattern matching bitstrings[0]. Not usually helpful in compilers, but an evolution of pattern matching that other languages should take up, in my opinion.

0: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Kernel.SpecialForms.html#%3C%3C%3E...

tikhonj•10mo ago
OCaml also has a binary string pattern matching feature which sounds pretty similar: https://practicalocaml.com/parsing-with-binary-string-patter...
Rendello•10mo ago
Erlang's bitstring/binary handling is one of those things that once you use, you'll wonder why it's not in every language (alongside, for me, Rust's enum/sum types and Python's badly-named but wonderfully useful while-else).
xelxebar•10mo ago
Studying the BEAM is definitely on my ToDo list. It's task parallelism sounds exemplar, and I really want to understand the architectural ramifications of choosing fine-grained task parallelism vs. a data parallel-friendly approach.
troupo•10mo ago
I wish articles like this had more meat on why BEAM is good.

You have to say why it's good. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28015852

brandonpollack2•10mo ago
If only there was a typed language that didn't hand wave serialization
mrkeen•10mo ago
I don't think we'll ever do better than 'IO is made out of bytes'.
kimi•10mo ago
Like Java?
monkfish328•10mo ago
Love beam

I just wish elixir had static typing built in :)

arrowsmith•10mo ago
Give Elixir a try anyway, you might be surprised:

https://arrowsmithlabs.com/blog/you-might-not-need-gradual-t...

Taikonerd•10mo ago
Then you'll love Gleam -- it's a BEAM language with static typing!

https://gleam.run/

idahoduncan•10mo ago
The Strand programming book states that an early version of the Erlang runtime was implemented in Strand (see "13.1: History" http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/files/strand-b...), which is an interesting tidbit that I haven't seen come up when the history of Erlang is discussed, like in the featured article.
kristel100•10mo ago
It’s fascinating how long the BEAM has lasted. And even more fascinating how relevant its concurrency model still is in today’s async-heavy world. Built different.